Julia Roberts has largely been away from TV since a 1998 guest role on 'Law & Order.' / Kevin Winter, Getty Images

by Gary Levin, USA TODAY

by Gary Levin, USA TODAY

Julia Roberts and Mark Ruffalo have been tapped to star in HBO's remake of the Tony-winning play The Normal Heart, due in 2014. The movie, about activists in the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, will be written by Heart playwright Larry Kramer and directed by Ryan Murphy, the prolific producer behind Glee, American Horror Story and The New Normal.

Kramer help found the Gay Men's Health Crisis and the play, which opened off-Broadway in 1985, was revived in 2011. The project will begin filming in New York later this year, after Barbra Streisand unsuccessfully tried to make a feature film adaptation.